Hitoshi Ueki -- Gomasuri Koushinkyoku（ゴマスリ行進曲）

 

Welcome to November 2023. It's definitely gotten seasonal here with the current temperature at 4 degrees Celsius. Hopefully, the chocolate bars and candies from last night's Halloween festivities have been tasty and won't end up as a coagulated semi-sentient mess in a year.

The video here is a decade old and comes from shin3mania TV and it shows someone grinding the sesame seeds which is known as gomasuri（ゴマすり）in Japanese. I've always done this whenever I go out to dine at any tonkatsu restaurant, and I do appreciate my ground sesame seeds on the tonkatsu itself or in the gloppy sauce. 

Gomasuri is also a slang term to mean ass-kissing or toadying up to the boss. I always saw that sort of character in a J-comedy set in the corporate world. They would be trying to curry favour with the president or section chief while seeing the main character as a meddling presence in the way up to the top.

My intention to start off the penultimate month of the year was to find something from my birth year of 1965 and I encountered this song by the late entertainer Hitoshi Ueki（植木等）. His most famous persona (although the real person was very far from this personality type) was that of the unrepentantly lazy and irresponsible company worker as displayed through his trademark tune of "Suudara Bushi" (スーダラ節）from 1961.

The 1965 song, "Gomasuri Koushinkyoku" (The Sycophant March) is another Ueki jaunty kayo kyoku of sinful personality where it's good to be as obsequious as possible. Gotta polish those apples and brown those noses. The usual trio arrived to take care of this song with Ueki behind the mike while Hiroaki Hagiwara（萩原哲晶）came up with the snappy melody for the orchestra and Yukio Aoshima（青島幸男）was behind the lyrics. 

Not surprisingly, there was a movie for Ueki with "Gomasuri Koushinkyoku" as the theme song: "Nippon Ichi no Gomasuri Otoko"（日本一のゴマすり男...Japan's No. 1 Sycophant） which hit the theatres in May 1965. One of the cast members was Mie Hama（浜美枝）who would later show up in the James Bond movie "You Only Live Twice" a couple of years later. That must have been quite the change from Ueki to Connery. In any case, you can see Ueki and Crazy Cats performing the song below and they're even doing the gesture for gomasuri.